November 27 1947 years
В Odessa, Ukraine was born Grigory Oster — writer, creator of the "Bad Advice" genre. Pacifist. He turns 77.
Read books to your children, not lectures.
Disobedient children need to be given harmful, not helpful, advice. They'll do the opposite, and it will turn out exactly right.
My bad advice is a vaccination against stupidity.
He spent his childhood and youth in Yalta, where the father worked as a turner in the port, and the mother as a librarian at the sailors' club.
At 16, he began writing poetry for adults. His first book, "How to Give Gifts Well," was published in 1975, when Oster was serving as a sailor in the Northern Fleet. It already included short stories about 38 parrots, a baby elephant, and a monkey.
At 35, he graduated from the Gorky Literary Institute, having studied by correspondence for 12 years. He worked in Yalta as a night guard at the open-air museum "Glade of Fairy Tales." During this time, he realized he had no interest in writing for adults.
He took up children's literature for survival reasons.
He wrote the scripts for the cartoons "A Kitten Named Gav", "38 Parrots", and "Caught the One Who Bit!"
He quickly earned a reputation as a writer who supposedly wrote for children, but in reality for adults. His pensive characters stood out from the cheerful heroes of Soviet fairy tales.
He became famous for his "pedagogy by contrast"—his "Bad Advice," which he wrote exclusively for naughty children. The first piece of bad advice, "The Brave Chef," was published in 1983 in Kolobok magazine.
I need to pour my mom's perfume into my dad's shoes,
And then lubricate these boots with shaving cream,
And, having poured them with fish oil mixed with black ink,
Throw it into the soup that mom made this morning.
And cook with the lid closed for exactly seventy minutes.
You'll find out what will happen when the adults come.
If you have firmly decided to hijack a plane to the West,
But you can't think of anything to scare the pilots with,
Read them excerpts from today's newspaper,
And they will fly with you to any country.
Beat your friends without respite
Every day for half an hour,
And your muscles
It will become stronger than brick.
And with mighty hands
You when the enemies come
You can in difficult times
Protect your friends
He invented new sciences: “nothing science”, “candy eating”, “literature”, “papamamology”.
Don't confuse high literature with banal lies.
In 2004, he co-authored the website “The President of Russia – to school-age citizens,” which is still in operation.
What should a citizen do who has fallen in love with his President too much, who can't live without him, who hangs presidential portraits on all four walls and memorizes everything the President said on television yesterday?
First, calm down. And understand that the President doesn't need declarations of love from citizens. The President only wants one thing: for citizens not to violate each other's rights. And it's not the President we need to love; we need to love our homeland.
In 2012, he wrote the book “The Rights of Children,” a translation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child into language understandable to children.
If the cub is very small, then no matter what the cub does, it is still not guilty of anything.
Back in 1989, he wrote the screenplay for the anti-war children's film "Before First Blood," in which he argued against the imposition of a militaristic agenda on children. In the story, children at a camp play Zarnitsa, but take its rules too seriously, leading to dramatic events.
That same year, he came up with the idea of a "children's disarmament committee": as part of this campaign, boys from the USSR and other countries wrote letters to each other and agreed to disarm (get rid of military-themed toys).
In February 2022, he condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Currently, he has only two posts on Instagram. One of them is a poem, "The Stubborn General," published in 1975. You can read it and congratulate the author here.
Obedient children are far more dangerous. Because when too many obedient children grow up in a country, millions of them grow up to be obedient adults, and then obediently go off to kill and die. Please don't raise overly obedient children.